What Are Backlinks and How They Can Improve Google Ranking of Your Website?

“Backlink” is one of the most used words in the world of search engine optimization. Many bloggers who have only recently started a blog or a website often struggle to understand what the term “backlink” means. In this post, I hope to offer you an understanding of what backlinks are and why they are essential to SEO and your online success.

Before I talk about the advantages of backlinks, you need to know that much has changed concerning backlinks in the past couple of years.

There was a time when even low-quality links helped in ranking a site. But since Google rolled out its Penguin algorithm, the whole landscape of backlinking has changed.

What are backlinks?

Backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links, and inward links that are in-coming to a website or web page.

Image Source: Moz

A backlink is a hyperlink that links from a Web page, back to your own Web page or Website. If you have so many backlinks of your website which has High Quality, it will appear in top results of Google because Google love links with quality. And if your website is in top results of Google, visitors will come to your website.

If you create backlinks in your website’s niche in some blogs or comments, people will read it and if found interesting or unique, that may click on it and come to your website.

Hence, backlinks increase website’s traffic.

Important Terms of Backlinks

Here is a description of common terms related to backlinks that you should know:

Link Juice: This term may be quite interesting for blogging beginners. When a web page links to your articles or a page on your website it passes link juice to the link also. Link juice helps in indexing and ranking your pages on search engines. Webmasters have a flexibility whether to pass link juice to connected website or not.

Nofollow Link: When a website links to another website, but the link has a Nofollow tag, that link does not pass the link juice. Nofollow links are not useful concerning the ranking of a page, as they do not contribute anything. In general, a webmaster uses the Nofollow tag when he is linking out to an unreliable site. Example: Links from comments on other blogs.

Do-follow link: By default, all the links that you add to a blog post are do-follow links, and these pass the link juice.

Linking Root Domains: This refers to the number of backlinks coming to your website from a unique domain. Even if a website has linked to your website ten times, it would be considered as the one linked root domain.

Low-Quality Links: Low-quality links are links that come from harvested sites, automated sites, spam sites or even porn sites. Such links do far more harm than good. This is one reason you should be careful when buying backlinks.

Internal Links: If you are writing a new article include your old blog posts links cleverly as it integrates with discussed content. This is called internal linking. Internal linking will allow users to stay with your content.

Anchor Text: Anchor textis the descriptive labeling of the hyperlink.Anchor texts have high weightage in displaying search engine results pages (SERP) rankings of a web page with respect to any given keyword. To rank for particular keywords anchor texts are a good choice.

Advantages of Backlinks in SEO

Now let’s take a look at why it is important for you to create backlinks to your site:

Higher search engine rankings:

Not all website traffic originates from a search on Google, Yahoo, Bing, or another search engine. Referral traffic is also a large percentage of all traffic, meaning that people are clicking on links within content and being taken to the linked content.

High-quality links on sites with a lot of traffic will not only help your SEO, but they can also drive targeted traffic to your website around the clock. A single link on a popular website can continue to push traffic to your website for years. The beautiful thing about referral traffic is that it is highly targeted.

Here is a video from Matt Cutts, head of webspam at Google that explains that backlinks are an important factor when Google is deciding what websites to show in their search results.

Faster indexing of website:

Backlinks help search engine bots to discover links to your website and to crawl your site effectively. Especially for a new website, it is important to get backlinks as they help in the faster discovery and indexing of your sites.

Referral traffic:

One of the major benefits of backlinks is that they help to get referral traffic. Usually, referral traffic is targeted and has a low bounce rate.

How to create backlinks to increase blog traffic

By using the right strategy, you can build natural and high-quality backlinks. Build links that drive relevant traffic to your website. Following are the tips to get quality and useful backlinks.

1. Guest blogging: Write blog posts on trustworthy websites in your niche. While choosing a website for writing blog posts, check the domain authority of the website. You can get direct traffic to your website through guest blogs.

2. Build links with Infographics: A well-designed and attractive infographic goes viral. An Infographic should give useful information to the readers. Share your infographic on social media channels to get more visibility to it.

3. Local listings: Local listing is best option to promote your business in a local area and gain quality backlinks. It will help you to get more traffic. Local listings mainly help the local and small business to increase their brand, sales and reach out to a fair number of customers. Submit your site to authoritative local business directories like Yellowpages, hotfrog, yelp etc.

4. Social media: Build a strong social profile on various social media channels like facebook, twitter, google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest. Links from social media channels are natural and quality links.

5. Social bookmarking: Social bookmarking consider as backlinks. There are best social bookmarking sites like delicious, Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon etc.

6. Submit your website link to web directories: In submitting your links, focus on directories with the best brand and traffic. You can try web directories that require annual fees or you can also search the web for free lists of link web directories like this list from clamber. Just make sure to submit only to web directories which are worthy of your trust.

7. Image, video, ppt promotion: Promote your strong content, it may be in any form(image, video, ppt) on various document sharing sites. These are the high-quality backlinks you can get.

8. Blog commenting and Question Answers: Comment on authoritative blogs in your niche. Make use of question-answer sites like Quora, Yahoo answers to get a backlink.

Conclusion

To actually earn backlinks, you must focus on giving tremendous value through content. There is no shortcut. There is no quick fix. You just need to think about how you can help your users. Then, create content that actually helps them.

If you find the information in this post useful, please share it with your friends and colleagues on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus!

Hey, Kanti here, Owner of Thelifetech.com, trying to learn as much as I can.. I'm a blogger, writer, graphic designer and SEO enthusiast. I love to share my knowledge with others through blogging. Enjoy reading and want to listen from you too. Read more about me...

3 COMMENTS

very helpful article now i understand where i should create my back link
can you tell me what is the easy way to find social bookmarking site. one more thing i want to ask that tell me google count page authority or not

Having read this I thought it was extremely enlightening.
I appreciate you spending some time and energy to put this content
together. I once again find myself spending way too much time both reading
and posting comments. But so what, it was still worth it!